'Dark' Gaiman getting green light in Hollywood

August 12, 2007|By Sam Adams Los Angeles Times

In the last 16 years, Neil Gaiman has watched more than a dozen of his comics, stories and novels languish in Hollywood's often dark maze of development without a single one making its way to the screen. The list of unrealized projects includes Chivalry, a short-story adaptation that Harvey Weinstein once hoped to direct; an animated version of the ancient Sanskrit epic The Ramayana for DreamWorks; and Good Omens, based on Gaiman and Terry Pratchett's comic novel, which Terry Gilliam has been trying to make since the turn of the century.

Lately, though, the tide has turned in Gaiman's favor. Stardust, adapted from Gaiman's illustrated novel, landed in theaters on Friday. Robert Zemeckis' motion-capture Beowulf, drawn from a 10-year-old script by Gaiman and Roger Avary, arrives in November. And the fall of 2008 will bring Coraline, a stop-motion version of Gaiman's eerie children's book, directed by Henry Selick (The Nightmare Before Christmas).

Gaiman's knack for rewriting myths in modern terms has made him perennially appealing to the movie industry, but his subversive approach to genre films has often gotten lost in translation. Avary, Gaiman's Beowulf collaborator, worked on a Sandman adaptation for Warner Bros. in the mid-'90s, where, Avary says, the assumption was that since Sandman "looked like Batman, it must be Batman. The basic argument was like, 'We want Sandman to be fighting so-and-so.' I was like, 'The Sandman doesn't fight.' "

"His work can be dark and complex," says Claire Danes, who plays one of Stardust's leads and penned the introduction to a Sandman collection when she was 18. "It's not obvious in a way that excites a lot of studio executives. It's subversive and ironic, and it's got a bit of a cocked eyebrow to it."

In the 1990s, Gaiman says, "the executives had no clue who I was. They didn't read comics. They didn't read fantasy or didn't understand it. They liked movies like Beaches. But the guys who brought you the bottle of still water and stayed over at the edge of the meeting, they knew who I was. They were the ones who in the corridor afterward would get me to sign their Sandmans. And they're now the ones running the studios."

Gaiman is now turning his attentions to directing a movie version of a Sandman offshoot, Death: The High Cost of Living. The movie has been in the works since 1996, but Gaiman has a new ally in director Guillermo del Toro, who signed on as executive producer and gave Gaiman a master class during the making of Hellboy 2.

Now ensconced at Picturehouse, the Death movie seems to be moving closer to reality. But Gaiman has been here before. "I've seen the green light blinking too many times on Death."

Still, he is optimistic. "It looks like it will probably get made earlyish next year in the U.K.," he says. "Unless it doesn't."